Improvements in MyCloud

A comprehensive research to match MyCloud with industry standards

July 2019
ANJUM KATARIA


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 Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Problem
3. Solution
4. Conclusion

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 Introduction
Requirements for a cloud Optimisation software
As the world has shifted its operations to cloud ,there is not a lot of knowledge and the skilled
personnel to manage the spendings on the cloud. Small businesses and enterprises tend to
overpay for the services they use. They end up paying for the services they don’t need or end
up reserving services for a long term which tend to be unnecessary. We need to provide our
customers with a comprehensive cloud management software which manages industry
standard tools with being compatible with all the major service providers.

The market is flooded with similar cloud optimisation softwares which help you
track your usage, use analytics to judge how much services you are going to need
in the future and prevent you from buying unnecessary services.
MyCloud does not give you any such features. Currently Mycloud provides data
which helps us decide how much services we are currently using and how much
money we are paying.

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 Problem

Currently nearly every cloud customer of HCL Technologies will eventually

need a cloud optimisation software.

Manpower cannot replace the need for a software because multiple data sets
need to be evaluated at the same time and proper optimisation functions be used
to find where we can find a minima for cost using multiple cloud service
providers.

If we do not provide such service ,the customer is bound to use another

company’s product which drives potential business away and also loosens our
grip over our customer’s business which will in turn drive our current business
away from us to our competitors.

The need of the hour for our company is to design and implement a working
cloud cost management software so that we can bundle it with other preexisting
services of ours so that we retain business and remain viable in the market.

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 Solution
There are multiple services and tools which are already available in the market. We need to
replicate certain functionalities and also create some of our own.
Major functionalities which need to be present are

1. Multi-Cloud Environment Support

The services are priced differentially for different cloud providers so to form a complete
solution for a company we need to provide a complete compatibility with Google Cloud
Platform, Azure and Amazon Web Services and other cloud service providers.
The software should be able to advice us to shift our data from Provider A to Provider B if the
at a certain geographical location Provider B provides cheaper service than Provider A.
The software should also have the capabilities to save money within a particular provider such
as suggest us to use service A instead of service B if we are not using all the capabilities of
service B and can work just fine with service A.

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2. Auto-Scaling
Autoscaling is a feature which allows us to scale our services if there is a difference between
what we need and what we are buying.
We need to use analytics to see wether if there is a drop in demand during certain hours or
days of the week. It will help us cutdown on what we are paying for.

Over-allocation wastes expensive server resources and decreases ROI for the infrastructure. In
public cloud environments, over-provisioned instance types mean higher daily costs. And for
private cloud workloads, rightsizing your workloads can result in deferred hardware purchase
savings over several quarters, years or even in perpetuity.

In addition to running rightsizing reports, a cloud management platform can also gather

performance metrics to determine the average and peak resource consumption of an instance
over a configurable period. If these remain below a threshold, the CMP will recommend a
change to a smaller, more appropriate instance type.

With configurable rightsizing rules, you can enforce more aggressive rightsizing thresholds for
less critical workloads, leading to even more savings. For example, you might configure a
threshold for downsizing a less critical workload when CPU usage is less than 50%, but
downsize a critical workload only when CPU usage is less than 25%.
I
t’s important to manage capacity and sprawl in an integrated fashion, such that both IT and
the end consumers of IT services have visibility of their workload capacity needs. Providing
rightsizing recommendations ensures that the infrastructure is optimized for the real needs of
the business. Moreover, giving stakeholders rightsizing visibility empowers the end IT
consumers to make knowledge-based decisions in real time.

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3. Governance
The cost of services are different for different regions. As Amazon explains the price
differences by saying, "We charge less where our costs are less.”.

Though this presents a problem some countries have data localisation laws .

They prevent companies from storing important mission critical data(mostly financial) outside
the boundaries of the country.

This produces a challenge and an opportunity for us. We can create such a software such that
advices us to store our mission critical data in the country we have to and store other data in
countries which have cheaper data storage prices.

The software will take into account the current location and the laws of the land of the
current location and will suggest out decisions on our business.

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4. Feedback from customers
The customers know best what they want . The customers know what their business need and
what they actually want. I personally advice that in the initial stages for the development of
the software/tool we should give the tool away for free in the market.
We should ask freelancers and award them for the inputs they give if their inputs turn out to
be actually used in the software.

Conclusion
The rush towards cloud computing was fuelled in large part by cost-conscious IT departments
that saw the cloud as the natural next step for virtualization and a way to stretch tight
budgets, and by the need for IT to provide fully elastic services that can scale in real time. But
that doesn’t mean it’s time for IT to take its eyes off the bottom line.
The bottom line is at the end we need to help our customers save money and end up making
some money in the process.
A cloud optimisation software is the need of the hour for our customers and we need to help
them solve this problem. We need to start working on the software and even adding one
feature would be a great start.

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